Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Do you work on a desktop machine? At home?

Whenever I'm having a remote day yes. Some projects can take literally hours to fully recompile. The more cores, the better.

Will also be getting a Ryzen if the singlecore benchmarks show it's reasonable. Bunch of games I play at home tend to absolutely trash single core perf.

Why do you "fully recompile"? Use Google Bazel and never fully recompile anything.

Because debugging and making changes. Trying to get some centralized server to produce just the right combo of Windows sdk and msvc (Just an example) would take even more time.

And then there is the hassle of setting it up for all the possible projects one might work on.

EDIT:

Just some examples. Instead of developing electron application think of making changes to chromium. Instead of depeloping Qt application think of developing Qt itself. Etc etc.

Even so, with a proper build system you shouldn't need to recompile. That said, I don't think Windows has what I'd call a proper build system.

One needs to recompile with a brand new checkout.

Most of the time buildsystems work. Including one in Visual Studio. But I have never encountered a system that would always work flawlessly. From time to time one gets things like changes not detected or something else going haywire and one has to do make clean and just redo the whole thing.

Another thing is when your'e doing profile guided builds then one has to do a full rebuild after each profiling run.

Not with Bazel (on Linux or Mac at least). It builds everything incrementally. If inputs that go into the build node did not change, they won't be rebuilt. You almost _never_ fully recompile, and with a cache incremental builds almost never take more than a couple of minutes. Google builds everything it runs from source, including things like compilers, runtimes, stdlibs, etc. Imagine if every engineer had to rebuild everything from the kernel up from source on every check-out. That wouldn't work.

Uhm, yes? What else would you do work on at home? On a laptop, with its shitty position for the head, back and the hands? I do have a laptop but that's purely for entertainment - my work is done 100% on a desktop, both at home and in the office.

Pretty much everyone I know uses laptops at home which is why I was curious. I've always wanted to try out a home PC build for work at home w/ linux. But it's just easier to keep using my work Macbook Pro for everything.

Also I always connect it to a large monitor + mechanical keyboard both at work and at home for any serious work... so not sure why you mentioned the neck/hand position.

Laptops with Thunderbolt 3/USB-C are pretty great for use with a docking station.

I get the advantage of having nice large monitors, proper clicky keyboards and mice, and the ability to charge/power the laptop - all over one cable. When I want to move away from the desk - unjack and keep going.

Why not? Lot's of FOSS development happens this way.

I do a lot of work related experiments at home for my own learning and to help what I do for my employer.

I work pretty much 100% on my desktop at home every day. Only reason I'm on a laptop right now is because of a power outage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com